Prominent Speakers Stress the Importance of Freedom at Victoria Conference

Social media content creators Clyde Nichols and Martin Belanger speak at the Reclaiming Canada Conference in Victoria, B.C., on June 22, 2024. (Jeff Sandes/The Epoch Times)

VICTORIA—The third annual Reclaiming Canada conference was held in Victoria June 22 and 23 to a weekend crowd of approximately 1,000 people, with speakers from Canada, the United States, and even Europe.

Hosted at the Victoria Conference Centre by citizen group We Unify, the conference featured a line-up of prominent speakers primarily with backgrounds in law, medicine, and social media to discuss issues related to freedoms.

“Just the fact that you are here and have chosen to come to this event tells me a lot about what’s in your heart,” said British rapper and podcaster Zuby who moderated the event on June 22.

American media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky began the conference by describing what he characterized as a dangerous culture change that is not conducive to maintaining a free society.

“The threat to democracy comes from those who write off ordinary people as racist. The threat to democracy comes from those who write off working people as mere populous,” said Dr. Pinsky, an internist and addiction medicine specialist.

People attend the Reclaiming Canada Conference in Victoria on June 22, 2024. (Jeff Sandes/The Epoch Times)

Professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, talked about the importance of maintaining objectivity and ethics in medicine.

“I think medicine is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around, and not a medicine that views itself as having the power to tell the people to do this, take that, stay home, and keep your kids out of school,” Dr. Bhattacharya said in an interview.

“The ideas of freedom, of patient autonomy, of democratic representation in decisions about public health are vital for people to regain trust. Public health needs to be more humble and it needs to seek the trust of everyone in the population.”

Clyde Nichols describes himself as “humble mechanic from Squamish, B.C.,” but moonlights as a popular Canadian content creator better known on social media as Clyde Do Something, who also spoke at the conference.

Mr. Nichols has the challenging job of finding innovative ways to approach relevant topics on social media without triggering bans. The line is blurry and often changing, he says.

“This is a battle we’re fighting on several fronts,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview.

Katrina Panova, known as Kat Kanada on social media, who fled the USSR as a child with her parents. (Jeff Sandes/The Epoch Times)

Conference volunteer Katrina Panova, better known as Kat Kanada, who has built a career on social media, said due to having fled Soviet-controlled Moldova with her family when she was 11-years old, she knows first-hand the perils of suppression of speech and ideas.

“For people like myself who fled communism, and other immigrants as well, we were sounding the alarms. Like, this is what’s happening and it’s not good. This can’t lead anywhere good. Censorship is never okay. It only leads to authoritarian tyranny,” she said in an interview.

But, she said, there’s more and more positive signs that things are improving.

“Now I see signs of hope, and seeds of hope for people unifying, like here at the We Unify Reclaiming Canada Conference,” she said. “It’s giving me a lot of motivation to just forge ahead and keep going.”